"You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids!
But they still just do what they want to do!
Why can't they be like we were,
Perfect in every way?"
Lyrics: Bye Bye Birdie
The United States is the exceptional country. With God's blessing, America does things right. We are the City on the Hill.
We have the right Constitution, the right religion, the right system of market capitalism, the right treatment of women, the right understanding of modesty and dress, the right treatment of minorities within our culture. We have the Bill of Rights. We have sound business practices, honest government, and a solid tradition of the peaceful transfer of power from one leader to the next. We have a grand and glorious history that our children should learn and cherish.
Foreigners would be a lot happier it they did it our way. And yet, even when people from shit-hole places are given every good opportunity to learn from us, sometimes they insist on worshiping false gods, continuing inferior cultural practices, choosing poor leaders.
I suspect readers will sense I am being sarcastic and playful, like the Bye Bye Birdie lyrics. But nearly all my readers are Americans, and I suspect most of us feel comfortable in--or at least accustomed to--our way of life here. We acknowledge that America isn't perfect, but feel our system of government is pretty good considering the alternatives, that our culture's treatment of women is certainly better than what we see in fundamentalist Islam, that capitalism is better than communism or whatever else is out there, and that the Afghan government we have been supporting for 20 years is clearly better than the Taliban. Therefore, the collapse of the Afghan government and its replacement by the Taliban is a gigantic misfortune, certainly unwelcome to the Afghan people, who now will face brutal oppression by their own leaders.
And yet, after 20 years of support and instruction, the Afghan government and army folded and turned their weapons over to the Taliban without a fight.
Constance Hilliard is a college classmate, another member of the cohort imprinted by the war in Vietnam and its various lessons. She responded to the comment of Dolf Garcia, a Boston lawyer and yet another classmate. He observed:
Most of what we do is well intentioned, but based on our culture and how we envision life. Most other cultures reject and do not want much of what we want, have, seek and stand for.
Constance Hilliard stayed at Harvard and completed her Ph.D. in history. She studied African and Near Eastern History and is a professor of history in Texas. Her scholarship has examined differences among people and the errors policymakers make when they assume people want and need the same things. Our sense of the "normal average American" misleads us because we imagine an unrepresentative reference group--White Americans, i.e. "us." This led her to insights about the very differing medical needs of people with roots in different parts of Africa, people now living in the U.S. experiencing high blood pressure and dying younger. People whose ancestors adapted to salt-poor places in West Africa have different kidney function than do "regular Americans." They retain salt, a necessary adaption. The American medical and nutrition standards profoundly misunderstood them. American medicine is as ethnocentric and narrow as are policy-makers in assuming the bodies of White Americans set a universal standard.
Guest Post by Constance Hilliard
America learned nothing from the Vietnam fiasco because of arrogance and the racist assumption that we're more intelligent than non-westerners. And I was heart sick when the U.S. invaded Iraq, even though my business interests in Kuwait had collapsed on account of Saddam's earlier invasion. Everyone in the U.S. foreign policy establishment knew that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were ferocious enemies and that such an invasion made no sense. Rather than criminalizing 9/11 and going after the individual actors, which Mideast countries would have supported us in, the U.S. foolishly decided to invade Islam and we got beat.
Regardless of what Eisenhower did or didn't do, he nailed it when he warned us "to beware the military industrial complex." The military is plowing us under with lies. But Trump's election and the MAGA insurrectionists have given me a somewhat different perspective on all of these dishonorable wars we've engaged in since WW II. It is this. At last count, 74 million Americans just so happen to know nothing about world geography and politics and prefer to remain ignorant. However, they are easily persuaded to get out the AR-15s at any real or imagined provocation. Even though Trump's base wanted for us to get out of meaningless wars, they also happen to be the folks who voted in the Republicans that kept us in those wars.It's not a few culprits, like the military brass plus the Bushes and Cheneys of the world. It's the fascist, racist, know-nothing ethos of at least half of the American population.
7 comments:
"At last count, 74 million Americans just so happen to know nothing about world geography and politics and prefer to remain ignorant."
And Republican politicians would like to keep it that way. Their utter disdain for their own constituency reminds one of the attitude the Orkin Man has for ants, necessary for business but unworthy of concern.
But I digress...
Only 1 in 6 humans live in a developed country. While wealth inequality is troublesome in those nations, globally it's stunning. This is the reality that challenges progress. Assuming clean water and indoor plumbing is of value, how do we provide that for everyone on the planet?
At present we can't. Our imagination can envision the possibility, our morality sees the virtue, but the hard truth is that the standard of living for the developed world cannot be extended into those places without diminishing it. The main reason is due to the enormous amount of energy each of us consumes from a finite supply, much of it wasted on trivial luxuries. Climate change exacerbates the problem.
Afghanistan isn't even a real country. Around 90% of the world's opium comes from Afghanistan, and most of it is destined for the illicit market here. The other main export is rugs. My guess is that ambitious warlords will eventually turn on the Taliban and the area will devolve back to tribal cartels.
The "Trump administration" cynically set up an unrealistic withdrawal deadline that they knew would damage a Democratic president if they lost, but one they could easily renege if they won. Biden knew it, accepted the risk and can take the heat. Democratic self-sabotaging hubris became a unforced error and gift to Republicans, and it's clear the decision is to bite the bullet, cauterize the wound and move on.
Sadly, probably the right thing.
The Taliban taking over is bad news for Russia, China, Iran, and will have a moderating effect on Pakistan according to an article recently read. Let those countries deal with their neighbor rather than The US.
Great guest post by Ms. Hilliard. The following is what I posted on my FB page 2 days ago:
"The situation in Afghanistan is particularly painful for those of us who served in Vietnam and then experienced the 29-30 April 1975 collapse, even though we knew it was coming years before. I went to Vietnam in early 1971 and spent a year there knowing we had already lost.
While the loss of American lives during the Afghanistan war is truly devastating for all of us, the younger among us might not know that in May 1968 alone, America lost almost as many young people as during the whole 20 years in Afghanistan. I received my draft notice that month and was very aware.
America's misguided international follies have immeasurable cost to its citizenry while concurrently lining the pockets of the privileged. Last year Bloomberg listed the 100 richest neighborhoods in the United States. 9 of those are just outside our nation's capital. You know why. Don't forget. Young lives are at stake."
The above comment, by "Unknown" citing his own service in Vietnam, was written by David Landis, a high school classmate and fellow debate team member. He has had a long, successful career assisting U.S. product developers grow business relationships in China. He accidentally neglected to sign his post.
Peter Sage
Totally disagree that Republicans have any monopoly on this.
This is a bipartisan national disgrace. E.g., which administration elevated bin Laden and created the Taliban out of its long, long Cold War?
"Rather than criminalizing 9/11 and going after the individual actors, which Mideast countries would have supported us in, the U.S. foolishly decided to invade Islam and we got beat".
Stock leftist piffle. "Criminals" with the goal of...advancing the ummah. Muslim theocracies have long been state sponsors of "individual" terrorists, ever since Nasser's final ignominy taught them they could not defeat Israel on the conventional battlefield. Sunni or Shiite, Taliban or OBL, Iran or Saudi Arabia, they hate America implacably....not for our freedoms, but for our sponsorship of Israel. The Prophet supposedly flew a winged horse from the Arabian desert to the Dome of the Rock in the 7th century CE, so Muslims consider Jerusalem to be "their" third holy city, after Mecca and Medina even though Jews have been in Jerusalem for several thousand years.
All the rest, including their sometime Palestinian mascots and stalking horses, is but window-dressing for pure, unlimited and self-righteous religious imperatives. "Invade Islam and got beat"? Then "victorious" Islam can stop pissing and moaning and killing kafirs, women, children and homosexuals as a worldwide holy prerogative, then, eh? Of course not. Their precious, Jerusalem, is still held by subhumans. Dr. Hilliard seems to have forgotten that the Islamic world itself is the product of swordpoint imperialism, with world submission to puritanical repression the invariable--and regressive--goal. She did accurately name the enemy, though, whatever her own rooting interests.
Constance Hilliard says that we don't understand other people who have different perspectives, and then she proves her point by caricaturing 74 million Americans as, "know nothing about world geography and politics and prefer to remain ignorant. However, they are easily persuaded to get out the AR-15s at any real or imagined provocation." Ms. Hilliard would do well to look in a mirror before she casts that stone.
I supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and racism had nothing to do with it. I supported the invasion because of the likelihood that Saddam Hussein had been secretly developing nukes.
What we knew in 2003 was that Saddam had tried twice before. His first try was the construction of the Osirak nuclear reactor, an attempt which was foiled when Israel destroyed it. His second try was only discovered after the Gulf War of 1991, when the IAEA found a previously-unknown large installation of calutrons, devices for separating isotopes of uranium so that enough U-235 could be produced to make atomic bombs.
Given that Saddam had tried twice before, it seemed likely to me that he would be trying again. Saddam himself contributed to this impression by screwing around with and (if I remember right) expelling the international nuclear inspectors.
After we invaded, we found out that Saddam was not doing this. But that's hindsight. We did not have the ability to see that future in 2003. Saddam was purposely acting like he was building nukes, hoping that we would think he already had nukes, and that we would be deterred by that.
We experienced a "false positive," and as a result invaded Iraq. This had negative consequences mostly stemming from Bush's incompetent management of the aftermath (disbanding the Iraqi military and the Ba'ath Party, ignoring tribal concerns, etc). What if, instead, there had been a "false negative," a situation in which Saddam had nukes and we believed he didn't? That would have been much worse. In 2003, lacking the hindsight that came later, we had to make a choice. And I agreed with that choice at that time.
Going back to Ms. Hilliard's idea about the importance of understanding the perspectives of others, in the aftermath of 9/11 it became very important to understand what was going on in the Islamic world. I read a lot at that time, especially the works of Bernard Lewis. His book, What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, in particular ought to be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the ongoing clash between modern Western societies and the Islamic world.
According to Bernard Lewis, there is a fundamental clash between modernity and Islam, stemming in part from the total lack of anything like "separation of church and state" in Islam. This has prevented the Islamic world from keeping up with the progress that Western societies have made over the past few centuries.
And none of this has anything to do with "arrogance and racist assumptions."
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